Now investigate West Midlands police

The Ofcom ruling today totally exonerating the Channel Four Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque should not be the end of this disturbing episode. The programme exposed the preaching of extremism and hatred in a number of British mosques, several of them supposedly ‘moderate’ and mainstream. In any rational society those preachers, who were inciting hatred against gays, Jews, women and non-Muslims, would have been arrested and prosecuted. But this is Britain, and what happened after Undercover Mosque was transmitted was an object (or should that be abject) lesson in how to hand victory to the Islamists on a plate.

First, West Midlands police investigated whether any offences had been committed at these mosques and presented their findings to the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS decided there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against anybody. Then the West Midlands police decided that the real villains of the piece were the makers of the Dispatches programme itself for stirring up racial hatred. This astounding view was dismissed by the CPS. Undaunted in its determination to find the Dispatches team guilty of something, the police then referred the programme to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, claiming that it had distorted various speakers’ comments, edited material in a manner likely to

undermine community cohesion

and was

likely to undermine feelings of public reassurance and safety of those communities in the West Midlands for which the Chief Constable has a responsibility.

Now Ofcom has robustly rejected all these charges and concluded:

Undercover Mosque was a legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of important public interest. Ofcom found no evidence that the broadcaster had misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity. On the evidence (including untransmitted footage and scripts), Ofcom found that the broadcaster had accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context.

Questions must now be raised in Parliament about the behaviour of the West Midland police. By their actions, they have made the people of Britain signally less safe. The Dispatches programme performed a public service in exposing sources of the kind of extremism that threatens the safety and security of this country. For the police to turn on this programme with patently implausible charges against it is deeply sinister and against the public interest. As Channel Four said after the ruling, the police action had given

legitimacy to people preaching a message of hate.

The West Midlands police appear to have turned themselves into a mouthpiece for Islamists trying to shut down legitimate and necessary debate. The idea that the police should believe that ‘community cohesion’ — aka the sensitivities of the Muslim community – should trump the need to identify those endangering not only the cohesion but the security of the whole country suggests that the police have totally lost the plot here. There is also something badly wrong with a system which is unable to act against those identified on this programme inciting hatred in this way. Is this because of the pusillanimity of the CPS? Is it the inadequacy of the law? Whatever the reason, this is the way a culture offers up its own throat to the knife.